Permanently Deleted

  • Downanotherday [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    The moment the Biden administration 180’d to publicly taking the lab leak seriously with no proof is when I knew Biden was just told it was an American lab leak.

    • PlantsRstillCool [des/pair]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Ngl I always found all the lab leak stuff from both sides to be total bullshit but your point is actually starting to win me over. It just makes too much sense

      • Mehrunes_Laser [comrade/them, any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        The lab was ordered shut down in August 2019 after it had at least two "breaches of containment". The wiki is a fun rabbit hole.

            • TankieTanuki [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              The label "conspiracy theory" means it is not endorsed by those in power, nothing more.

              There is also https://wikispooks.com/wiki/COVID-19/Origins#US_origin.3F.3F

                • TankieTanuki [he/him]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  Yeah I agree. I've encountered some antisemetic stuff on there too. I suppose it's inevitable for an open wiki devoted to all types of conspiratorial thought. The quality of their pages varies highly. It's disappointing because it's often a great resource.

            • ClathrateG [none/use name]
              ·
              edit-2
              3 years ago

              The above doesn't sound that objective or encyclopedia-like to my ear. It's been a biological weapons lab for almost a century; that seems "baseful" enough to me. Membender (talk) 21:51, 23 July 2021 (UTC)

              I believe the word is based

  • ToastGhost [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    vapes killing people became a thing for like a month in the fall before covid, then dropped off the face of the earth, i can definitely see that being a coverup now that someones made the connection with covid.

    • Dingdangdog [he/him,comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      what a good fucking emote. why do we even have it. it's incredible and it works, so I guess that answer my previous question

  • ThisMachinePostsHog [they/them, he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    We're talking about the government that entertained the idea of staging a terrorist attack against its own citizens in Miami to blame it on Cuba. This is absolutely within the realm of reality.

          • Ericthescruffy [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            One of these days? Guarantee it's already happened. Hell it's basically the overarching plot of the metal gear solid franchise.

            I used to discard conspiracy mindset because it can often be a coping mechanism to deal with the madness and chaos of the world by assuming it's all according to someone's plan (even if the plan is horrible). As I get older I'm starting to see that the truth is actually the worst of all worlds. The machine is too fucking big and too fucking automated for a council of a dozen people to have any real semblance of top down control even if they are the ultimate benefactors.

      • SiskoDid2ThingsWrong [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        So I did this with my lib ass sister once, when I literally emailed her like 10 sources her response was basically "okay maybe this shit is true, but going on about it still makes you sound like a conspiracy theorist"

        • marxisthayaca [he/him,they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I showed my dad information about Operation Condor and how that shit was obviously not beneficial to the stability to various countries, let alone Latin America in general, and he just shrugged his shoulders. The mental gymnastics people will do to bootlick the USA is outstanding.

  • WoofWoof91 [comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Was very weird that the vape thing only happened in a small bit of america for like a month, then it fizzled out

    • Dingdangdog [he/him,comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      The story of it being from a batch of THC cartridges made with oil instead of the glycols you're supposed to use also does kinda make sense.

      Like dumbasses with vapes don't know the difference and if you're just buying it from some dude there's not really a way to be sure if it's the right stuff.

      • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        The story of it being from a batch of THC cartridges made with oil instead of the glycols you’re supposed to use also does kinda make sense.

        it's still false.

        Check out Nathan Rich. The vitamin E oil is NOT the cause, as there were victims who did not use oil vapes. This vape outbreak was also limited strictly to the USA. None in Europe.
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdKI5qOF_a8&t=3s

        It's also a fact that vapers are 5x more likely to catch covid due to compromised lung surfaces. Canary in the mine essentially.

        There are also the Fairfax county outbreaks in July 2019, where people caught a mystery pneumonia. This pneumonia tested negative for any standard flu/cold infections, among others, and doctors remarked on how atypical it was.

        Retirement outbreak
        This comment is from July 2019

        There's been a continuous stream of mysterious COVID-like diseases, which tested negative for other common viruses, from July 2019 - November 2019 in the USA.

        Teenage boy gets pneumonia in October or November 2019, recovers, then dies of a random blood clot. Textbook Covid death, and I would bet money that boy had blood type A (predisposed to clotting, and clinically shown to have higher COVID death rates and post-covid clotting)

        November 2019 is also when Trump had his mystery hospital visit, after which he admitted on private tapes that covid was going to be devastating, while contradictorily never wearing a mask. Almost as if he had received some sort of preventative therapy.

        COVID-19 was a lab leak from Ft. Belvoir, and when it became uncontainable the US military seeded it at the Wuhan military games as a coverup (possibly via leaks through the US-funded WIV)

        A TALE OF TWO YEARS There were a ton of US pneumonia outbreaks that made the news in 2019, when compared with 2018.

        • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          This is some wild amount of speculation lol

          (As much as I'd love if it was true)

          Also I think Trump didn't mask because he didn't like the way it made him look. Dude's always been obsessed with appearance

          • TankieTanuki [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            :tromp: No, YOU'RE speculation!

            spoiler

            Seriously though, it's okay to speculate and connect dots. It's how literally all investigations are done.

            The difference between rational speculation and deranged or paranoid speculation is that the latter type ignores contravening facts and evidence. In other words, it's okay to continue to speculate as long as your hypothesis hasn't yet been falsified.

            So think critically about it. What is it that makes this theory "wild"? Is it just because of the scope of the lie, or is there evidence that rules it out? If so, state what that evidence is rather than laughing at the people trying to look into this. :meow-hug:

            • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
              ·
              edit-2
              3 years ago

              I did further down, mainly just that I don't see why they'd do a risky and highly experimental procedure on the president.

              And if they did have a treatment that worked, they would have been very public about it from day one. The last thing they wanted to do was lockdown. If they had a treatment they could point to, they would have pointed to it.

              Other than that, yeah I basically agree. Especially because the end result of it being a weaponized virus, an accidental leak, or a natural disease are all the same. The US used this pandemic as a political cudgel against the entire world.

              • TankieTanuki [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                Okay, thanks for sharing your reasoning.

                I think the theory that Trump received some kind of experimental vaccine is ancillary to the larger theory about a US lab leak and the vaping illness. The rest of the theory doesn't hinge on it at all.

                If there was a treatment though, we have no way of knowing how risky or experimental it actually was. They could have been working on this stuff for a long time, and all of that research would be classified. I've seen credible speculation that SARS2 is actually an attenuated derivative of the SARS virus intended for use in the creation of a SARS vaccine.

                If they had pointed to the experimental vaccine as soon as COVID struck the US, that would have revealed America's role in the creation of the virus.

                • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  That's the one thing that hinges on the weakest evidence and has the greatest implications. Namely that there was something they could have done about it, but didn't for some reason.

                  The rest is believable, and even if it's not true, Fort Derrick and the 200 other bio weapon labs the us runs absolutely need to be put in the spotlight and investigated then shut down.

                  If you lead with the Trump getting an experimental therapy that made him immune, you'll lose a lot of people right away though. So stick to what we know which is that the US has an insane number of bio weapons research facilities all around the world, and one of them was in close proximity to an unknown flu outbreak right before covid and was promptly shut down.

          • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            Also I think Trump didn’t mask because he didn’t like the way it made him look.

            Then why did he admit how devastating it was back in February 2020 on leaked private tapes? He basically said "this is gonna kill everyone" and then never wore a mask as a 75 year old.

            and AFTER that, it took him until October 2020 to actually GET covid, despite him literally never wearing a mask. Again, almost as if he had received some type of therapy that wore off after 11 months.

            If not, why was Trump a patient in Walter Reed in November 2019? What happened there? He came back with an IV bruise on his arm, and no explanation was ever given. Total mystery.

            • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
              ·
              edit-2
              3 years ago

              I'm saying he didn't wear a mask at speaking events, but likely followed precautions when the cameras weren't on him

              • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
                ·
                3 years ago

                it's whatever because even the trump stuff is secondary. Why did 2019 have so many pneumonia outbreaks compared to 2018? At a certain point you have to admit the probability of all of this stuff being coincidence is pretty low

                • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  The Trump thing is the most questionable, mainly because I don't think they'd do an experimental treatment on the president before he even got sick.

                  I do think that the US is hiding a lot of military research into weaponized pandemic, and I do think that even if covid was just a coincidence, they were ready to do something like this anyways.

                  This pandemic, wether natural or manufactured, was absolutely used as a political tool by the empire against China specifically and the third world generally with blame being aggressively thrown at China while vaccine efforts were locked behind imperial walls and used as a bludgeon against the over exploited colonies.

                  The one thing that definitely comes out of this is that the US no longer holds cultural hegemony. American exceptionalism is dead outside the domestic cults. What comes next is either a slow death of empire or a violent explosion of reaction.

                  Historically speaking, were on the cusp of another global imperialist war. The question is how willing is the populous, and how will this war be fought?

              • TankieTanuki [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                If a Trump wears a mask in the middle of the Oval Office and no one is around to film it, does he still make a heavy breathing sound?

        • D61 [any]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Oh, Fuck! :brace-cowboy:

          Oh, Shit! :liz-society:

          • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            I’m also fairly confident that the Trump administration was waging hybrid bio-warfare on Chinese agriculture, which is important context.

            Yeah, I didn't even mention this one. China's had like 10 different outbreaks of swine flu or avian flu or something-or-other over the last 5 years

            Why aren't other developing nations having such outbreaks? Why isn't India, which is far, far more polluted than China, and with far poorer sanitation measures, having weird outbreaks every other month?

        • spectre [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I'm not sure that I believe this (yet), but I like it

        • deadbergeron [he/him,they/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          my question is though, why didn't we see the same amount of crisis in the US in those months leading up to 2020? Because early on in our whole Covid thing, hospitals were overrun to the point they didn't have any beds left, they were running low on equipment. We went months with literally no precautions, but it seemed never to hit the same disaster point we hit in like spring 2020. And also if it had gotten out, it 100% would've spread to other countries, since Americans, especially in the Beltway, are so keen on travelling. But no other countries seemed to hit that crisis point. Was I just not paying attention? Was there crisis that just wasn't covered?

          • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            my question is though, why didn’t we see the same amount of crisis in the US

            low population density and natural spread

            vs. high population density and targeted deliberate spread

            also the virus even after release has been mutating into more and more contagious forms. The one that hit the West in 2020 (D614G) was already way more contagious than the Wuhan strain. It's probable that any hypothetical strain from July 2019 was even less contagious.

            • deadbergeron [he/him,they/them]
              ·
              3 years ago

              idk what you are defining as high vs low density, but the washington DC area is one of the denser areas of the US, and is also the southern end of the northeast megalopolis, which includes some of the densest areas of the US. Idk and i don't think any of those places can compare to China, especially not DC, but its not like you're out living in farmland or something. Its dense cities surrounded by dense suburbs up and down that part of the Atlantic Coast.

              Also the locations of those pneumonia outbreaks are Marshall County, WV, outside Phoenix, AZ and Terre Haute, IN. That's low density - the closest city to Marshall County is like Wheeling. If this thing could've spread to those sorts of places, then there can't be too much of a problem with density, and the virus already has access to the densest areas of the US, being situated on the northeast Atlantic Coast. Which is also a very global population with a lot of money, which should mean it can spread globally since those places travel a lot. At least if it can spread to the middle of West Virginia.

              Just trying to be critical before I buy this theory

      • WoofWoof91 [comrade/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I guess, but there have been spates of tainted drugs and shit in the past, but they've always been more widespread

        Like bunk pills and the weed dusted with caster sugar thing

  • deadbergeron [he/him,they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    While I think the US' continued botched response should be people's main focus, it really would be the icing on the cake if it came from the US and itd make their response just that much worse. and honestly it does line up

  • VILenin [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I remember a relative of mine almost dying from severe pneumonia in December '19. Possibly :covid-cool: ?

    • Ram_The_Manparts [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Yeah, my dad spent a week in the hospital in December '19, with pneumonia and "an infection".

      :curious-marx:

      • VILenin [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        My relative had a longer ordeal because it's the US. First visit to the ER (arriving in an ambulance, he was very sick) they told him to go home and take some pills. Every subsequent visit, despite him coughing basically 24/7 and vomiting several times, they basically told him to fuck off. Might as well go to the nurse at the local school and be told to have a cup of water.

        It was only when his wife took him on his final visit (she told me later that he looked like he was on his deathbed) that his abysmal state and her insistence resulted in him finally being hospitalized and receiving actual treatment. Apparently a nurse told him (according to him) that if he had waited another two days or so he would be dead. In more polite terms, I'd imagine.

          • VILenin [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            It's infuriating. Even if the horrible healthcare in this shithole country doesn't kill you, say hi to the medical bills. :jokerfied:

    • Lil_Revolitionary [she/her,they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      Early January 2020 I got a really bad flu. I was absolutely miserable, and I know at least 2 other people who had the same thing at the same time. But my breathing was fine and I got tested for Covid antibodies some time 4-6 months later and it came up negative, so it may have just been a regular flu

    • TankieTanuki [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      plus it officially originated in China so it doesn’t help with the claims

      This isn't true though. The origin remains officially undetermined. The Wuhan seafood market was the first reported outbreak, but it has been ruled out as the source.

      https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market-may-not-be-source-novel-virus-spreading-globally

    • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      At this point it's "no u" or try to defend yourself against a biased media talking to a biased audience.

      "No u" is much better than the alternative.

    • TheModerateTankie [any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      It was first identified in China because they were actively monitoring for another Sars outbreak. It's likely that it originated there, but it's not certain.

  • emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    What are the symptoms?

    Patients report experiencing rapid onset of coughing, weight loss and significant breathing difficulties. Other symptoms may include nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Symptoms generally appear over the course of a few days but can take as long as a few weeks to arise. The majority of patients are hospitalized, and while many of their symptoms overlap, their various diagnoses have included lipoid pneumonia (which can occur when oil enters the lungs), acute eosinophilic pneumonia (caused by the buildup of a type of white blood cell in the lungs) and acute respiratory distress syndrome.

    https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/09/18/760635457/the-vaping-illness-outbreak-what-we-know-so-far

  • Koa_lala [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    Always thought it was weird I got a mystery illness right before covid actually became a thing. It was like an abnormally heavy flu. I went to the ER because my fever was dangerously high. I have never been this sick. I had my blood drawn but they couldn't find anything specific at the time.

      • XKEYSCORE [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        January 2020 i was diagnosed with an "unknown respiratory infection", which had all the symptoms of covid. of course, i couldn't take time off work so I ended up spreading this to 5 coworkers

    • CommCat [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      yeah I got sick in late December of 2019 weeks before Covid was a big story in the Americas, wonder if it was flu or Covid? I catch the flu every few years, and this one wasn't worst than previous ones, but the timing has me wondering.

  • 420clownpeen [they/them,any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Not really enough for me to jump from the boring origin story of animal transmission from a bat or pangolin or whatever. But respect to the Chinese officials trolling right back against the Chinese bioweapon/lab leak shit.

    • TankieTanuki [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      The pangolin has been ruled out as a main suspect, FWIW.

      Here are some reasons to doubt the natural emergence theory:

      spoiler

      Doubts about natural emergence.

      Natural emergence was the media’s preferred theory until around February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization (WHO) commission to China. [...] What became clear was that the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory.

      This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months.

      Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 pandemic began, and after a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019. Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year.

      And as long as that remains the case, it’s logical to pay serious attention to the alternative conjecture, that SARS2 escaped from a lab.

      [...]

      Natural history and evolution.

      The initial location of the pandemic is a small part of a larger problem, that of its natural history. Viruses don’t just make one time jumps from one species to another.

      The coronavirus spike protein, adapted to attack bat cells, needs repeated jumps to another species, most of which fail, before it gains a lucky mutation. Mutation — a change in one of its RNA units — causes a different amino acid unit to be incorporated into its spike protein and makes the spike protein better able to attack the cells of some other species.

      Through several more such mutation-driven adjustments, the virus adapts to its new host, say some animal with which bats are in frequent contact. The whole process then resumes as the virus moves from this intermediate host to people.

      In the case of SARS1, researchers have documented the successive changes in its spike protein as the virus evolved step by step into a dangerous pathogen. After it had gotten from bats into civets, there were six further changes in its spike protein before it became a mild pathogen in people. After a further 14 changes, the virus was much better adapted to humans, and with a further four, the epidemic took off.

      But when you look for the fingerprints of a similar transition in SARS2, a strange surprise awaits. The virus has changed hardly at all, at least until recently. From its very first appearance, it was well adapted to human cells. Researchers led by Alina Chan of the Broad Institute compared SARS2 with late stage SARS1, which by then was well adapted to human cells, and found that the two viruses were similarly well adapted. “By the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV,” they wrote.

      Even those who think lab origin unlikely agree that SARS2 genomes are remarkably uniform. Baric writes that “early strains identified in Wuhan, China, showed limited genetic diversity, which suggests that the virus may have been introduced from a single source.”

      A single source would of course be compatible with lab escape, less so with the massive variation and selection which is evolution’s hallmark way of doing business.

      The uniform structure of SARS2 genomes gives no hint of any passage through an intermediate animal host, and no such host has been identified in nature.

      Proponents of natural emergence suggest that SARS2 incubated in a yet-to-be found human population before gaining its special properties. Or that it jumped to a host animal outside China.

      All these conjectures are possible, but strained. Proponents of a lab leak have a simpler explanation. SARS2 was adapted to human cells from the start because it was grown in humanized mice or in lab cultures of human cells, just as described in Daszak’s grant proposal. Its genome shows little diversity because the hallmark of lab cultures is uniformity.

      The author (Nicholas Wade) has an anti-China bias, but it's easy enough to separate his scientific reasoning from his racist projections.

  • NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    I still doubt it was covid, surely at least one person would have mentioned an absolute loss of smell.

    I'd laugh though :amerikkka: :gun-hubris: :some-controversy: